Global

Giving Dental Care

Carlos Muñoz-Viveros, chair of restorative dentistry, and Shirley Triplet worked with more than 500 patients during an outreach in the Dominican Republic.

“Ninety-nine percent of the people we treat have never had dental care. The one percent who have say we were the ones who treated them in the past.”

Jude Fabiano

School of Dental Medicine clinical associate professor and former Buffalo Outreach Community Assistance faculty advisor

Even small gifts can mean the world.

That’s what more than 300 UB dental students and residents
have learned through Buffalo Outreach Community Assistance (BOCA),
a School of Dental Medicine program that provides free dental care
in communities from Appalachia to West Africa that lack access to
services.

As of 2011, students and supervising faculty members in BOCA
have examined more than 12,000 patients, performing nearly 8,000
dental restorations and 11,000 extractions—work valued at
$3.2 million. Patients abroad have included residents of the
Dominican Republic, Ghana, Mexico, Guatemala and Tonga in the South
Pacific.

Many of the people BOCA treats have never received dental care
before.

In Sosua, a small village in the Dominican Republic, patients
were so appreciative of BOCA’s services that they embraced
their dentists after appointments. In Belize, a grateful prison
inmate hugged the student volunteer who restored his smile, fixing
four cracked teeth.

While patients are BOCA’s most important beneficiaries,
the dentists who take part in missions benefit as well. Student
volunteers gain hands-on experience in dentistry and acquire
important cross-cultural skills.